Intel Announces Open Fibre Channel Over Ethernet

sofar writes "Intel has just announced and released source code for their Open-FCoE project, which creates a transport allowing native Fibre Channel frames to travel over ordinary ethernet cables to any Linux system. This extremely interesting development will mean that data centers can lower costs and maintenance by reducing the amount of Fibre Channel equipment and cabling while still enjoying its benefits and performance. The new standard is backed by Cisco, Sun, IBM, EMC, Emulex, and a variety of others working in the storage field. The timing of this announcement comes as no surprise given the uptake of 10-Gb Ethernet in the data center."

Fiber channel

Fiber channel
In ye olde patch panel
Beats fiber thin
On your chinny-chin-chin
Burma Shave

Need target

This sounds quite cool, but I don't have any FC storage arrays or the "Fibre Channel Forwarder" they mention, so I would have to wait until they have the target written before being able to try it out.

Speed?

As far as I can see this is a way of bridging fibre channels over Ethernet. This does not necessarily mean that you will get fibre-like speed (throughput or latency). I am sure that this will have some use, but it does not mean that high performance data-centres will just be able to use Ethernet instead of fibre.

Re:Speed?

According to this netapp paper [netapp.com] even NFS over 10GbE is lower latency than 4Gb FC. I imagine if the processing overhead isn't too high or offload cards become available then this would be significantly faster than 4Gb FC. As far as bandwidth 10>4 even with the overhead of ethernet framing, especially if you can stand the latency of packing two or more FC frames into an ethernet jumbo frames.

Re:Speed?

Umm. The paper says that the test load was sequential reads entirely cached in memory, so not exactly an unbiased test.

10GE is a heck of a lot cheaper

As long as a server is within the distance limit of copper, 10GE is about 3-4x cheaper then even 2Gb FC. We've also had a heck of a lot more stability out of our 6500 series switches then we have out of our 9140's and the 9500's are extremely expensive if you have a need for under 3 cards worth of ports.

High End customers will not go to this.

As we have seen with iSCSI the bandwidth capability over Ethernet just is not there. I with the EMC this will probably be great for the low end company that needs a mid tier and low tier environment. However large corporations with large database and high number of systems still need to stay with fibre frabrics. This probably will be only on the mid tier platforms like clariion.

Re:High End customers will not go to this.

I expect you're right, but it's interesting to note they're referring to this as Fibre Channel over Ethernet, and not over IP. The reduction in overhead there (not just packet size, but avoiding the whole IP stack) might be enough to really help; and if you're running separate 10 Gigabit Ethernet for the storage subsystem (i.e. not piggy backing on an existing IP network) it might be really nice. Or at least, comparable in performance and a heck of a lot cheaper.

On the other hand, really decent switches that can cope with heavy usage of 10-GigE without delaying packets at all aren't going to be massively cheap, and you'd need very high quality NICs in all the servers as well. Even then, fibre's still probably going to be faster than copper... but that's just something I made up. Maybe someone who knows more about the intricacies of transmitting data over each can enlighten us all?

There was recently an article about "storing" data within fibre as sound rather than converting it to for storage in electrical components, since the latter is kind of slow; how does this compare to transmission via current over copper?

Re:High End customers will not go to this.

Latency and bandwidth are comparable for copper and fiber ethernet solutions today, the drawback to copper is you need to be within 15m of the switch. This isn't so bad in a small datacenter but in a larger facility you would either need switches all over the place (preferably in 2's for redundant path) or you'd need to go fiber which eliminates a good percentage of the cost savings. FiberChannel used to have copper as a low cost option but it's not there in the 4Gb world and even in the 2Gb space it was so exotic that there was almost no cost savings due to lack of economies of scale.

Re:High End customers will not go to this.

Bullshit.

The bandwidth is there. I can get 960 Mb/s sustained application-layer throughput out of a gigabit ethernet connection. When you have pause frame support and managed layer 3 switches, you can strip away the protocol overhead of iSCSI, and keep the reliability and flexibility in a typical data center.

The goal of this project is not to replace fibre channel fabrics, but rather to extend them. For every large database server at your High End customer, there are dozens of smaller boxes that would greatly benefit from centralized disk storage, but for which the cost of conventional FC would negate the benefit. As you've noted, iSCSI isn't always a suitable option.

You're probably right that people won't use this a whole lot to connect to super-high-end disk arrays, but once you hook up an FCoE bridge to your network, you have the flexibility to do whatever you want with it. In some cases, the cost benefit of 10Gb ethernet vs. 2x 4Gb FC alone will be enough motivation to use it even for very high-end work.

Srsly, FC or iSCSI?

I'm not a datacenter kind of guy, so help me out. If you've got 10 G Ethernet, then why would you want to run FC rather than iSCSI?

Can someone elaborate?

Too late: I'm already using AoE

AoE is awesome, it is cheap, it is simple. 8 page RFC. The only SAN protocol you can really understand completely in one sitting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_over_Ethernet [wikipedia.org]

And combine it with Xen or other virtualization technology and you have a really slick setup:

http://xenaoe.org/ [xenaoe.org]

Too late

It was announced almost 20 days back on lkml.
And the summary is incorrect in saying Intel has just announced.

Looks like either the /. editors are lousy buffons who do not care to click on the links to match the article summary or it is someone from Intel who is(are) trying to make sure that OpenFCoE gets some press.

doh... bad ,very bad journalism on part of slashdot.
Please do not be osnews, atleast check your articles for chirst's sake.

Re:Bumper cars.

Oh this should be interesting. Fibre over a collision-and hold-off architecture.

They have this newfanged technology. It's called switched Ethernet! It's amazing! With switched Ethernet, you get no collisions!

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:00:0D:03:01:04
                    inet addr:192.168.1.100 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
                    inet6 addr: fe80::000:00f0:0043:0084/64 Scope:Link
                    UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
                    RX packets:1781638 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
                    TX packets:1651683 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
                    collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
                    RX bytes:803882935 (766.6 MiB) TX bytes:333706343 (318.2 MiB)
                    Interrupt:18 Base address:0xd800


(address details fudged only)

Re:I'm more interested in AoE

I agree that AoE is the best way to go. You can get SAN performance without all the headache. I don't know of a Windows AoE initiator, but then again, expcept for my job and for gaming, I don't use windows.

Re:I'm more interested in AoE

You should give it a snappier name like Serial ATA Networking, or SATAN. Lots of interesting logo possibilities in that, and it'll be funny watching 'technology evangelist' types stutter, sweat and mumble when they give PowerPoint presentations to born again potential customers.

Re:Bumper cars.

Yea no kidding. No one understands what _Best_Effort_Protocol_ means. (sigh)

Here is the truth:
If you carved the words "ethernet" on a stick and then smeared shit over it, people would stand in line to buy it.

Re:who paid for this ad?

I see this as a benefit to smaller companies that need high speed storage, but maybe can't switch their entire storage network to fibre channel overnight due to cost. Many routers run Linux, so router manufacturers can probably add this functionality to existing Ethernet routers without hardware changes, making the cost of migration much smaller in the short term.

Re:who paid for this ad?

Is somebody running SAS more than 8 meters?

Re:I'm more interested in AoE

How is ATA over ethernet offtopic in a discussion about a way of migrating SAN technology to ethernet?

ATA, SATA and SAS all have severe connectivity limits. They don't have a way of addressing a large number of devices, running long distances or supporting multiple initiators. While they might be fine for your home they are worthless for the SAN/LAN environment where fibre channel and FCoE are targeted.